The most innovative games of 2024

Making up for lost videos

Hey all!

As you might know, I like to end the year with a video about "the most innovative game" of the last 12 months. So I've analysed games like Her Story, Baba Is You, The Forgotten City, and Jusant.

But you might also know that in November of 2024, I released my first proper video game on Steam: Mind Over Magnet. Which was amazing, exciting, and... utterly exhausting!

Once the game was done I had to tap out and take a big break from all of GMTK - which meant I wasn't able to do a new entry in the "most innovative" series. Sorry!

Thankfully I'm now back, well rested, and ready to make new videos. I'm working on the first GMTK episode of 2025, and I'm starting other new projects as well. I feel like this is going to be a very good year for the channel!

But I also didn't want to start the year with that missed video hanging over my head... So how about this?

Here are ten games from 2024 that were innovative and inventive. Games that I might have picked as the most innovative of the year. And with a few sentences about what made that game so unique. I recommend the lot, so fill up your Steam wishlist and check out some truly clever games.

1 - Shadows of Doubt

A crazy ambitious, procedurally-generated murder mystery game. The game magics up a whole city block filled with people - and then stages a murder. You have to pour through evidence to figure out who killed who. It can be janky and broken at times, but when it works it's unlike any other game.

Discussed in What Makes a Great Detective Game?

2 - The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom

Nintendo continues its wild experimentation into design, with the latest Zelda game. This time you can copy and paste elements like enemies and objects in order to solve puzzles, create a team of monsters, and utterly break the game. It's fun, it's weird, and it has some of the worst UI imaginable.

3 - Leap Year

This is a platformer about a hero who can't jump, because the fall will literally kill them. Basically: imagine Mario but with dodgy knees. This isn't a QWOP-style joke game, though - it's the set-up for an addictive game about knowledge and discovery. But it's way more approachable than something like Animal Well - this is a 'Metroidbraina' for mortals.

4 - Shashingo

Forget Duolingo. Forget pushy green owls. In this game you get to learn Japanese by taking photographs. Each snap will add a word - in Japanese and English - to your scrap book. You can then test your vocab knowledge by seeking out the same word again.

5 - UFO 50

A 50 game package by Spelunky maker Derek Yu and friends. This isn't just a nostalgic throwback to the 1980s, though. It’s a thought experiment into an alternate reality where game design branched out in a completely different direction. This leads to games that feel familiar, and yet completely new. Try Mooncat - a game that could only exist in a universe where Mario was never born.

6 - Isles of Sea & Sky

Discussed in A block-pushing puzzler on an open ocean

Block-shunting Sokoban puzzle games are a dime a dozen. But this one spreads the puzzles out across a Zelda-style open world, adds power-ups, and sprinkles in some secrets. It makes the whole thing feel like a completely new experience.

7 - Balatro

Turning poker into a roguelike is one thing. But it's those damn jokers - those game-breaking modifiers that change the rules. This makes you think on a meta-level as you construct a synergising machine that can turn simple poker hands into billion-point gambits. Masterful.

Discussed in Balatro’s ‘Cursed’ Design Problem

8 - Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown

Sure, it's a pretty bog-standard Metroidvania game. A extremely good one, I'll note, but still pretty familiar. But there's one feature that feels new: the ability to take a screenshot and pin it to the map. This helps you to navigate and backtrack across its massive map, and makes the game more approachable and accessible to Metroidvania newbies.

9 - Cryptmaster

An utterly unique take on the dungeon crawler, that mixes in riddles and the word-guessing game hangman. It's so rewarding to discover a new ability or puzzle solution by figuring out the correct word.

10 - Botany Manor

This "information" game is about finding seeds, planting them, and then creating the conditions for those flowers to bloom. You'll need to read the environment, deduce clues, and craft the conditions to make the plants work. Like an escape room, by way of a detective game, with a cozy style and a heartwarming narrative.

There we have it. What a fantastic year for innovative games, and what a terrible year to practically disappear from YouTube to go make a video game. But them's the breaks.

See you soon for the first GMTK episode of 2025.

Mark